


Spiral Galaxy

by freshbakedlady



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Post-Mission, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-20 22:33:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3667707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freshbakedlady/pseuds/freshbakedlady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha Romanov comes to SHIELD with nothing. They give her clothing and food, a job, a purpose. (The team, she picks out for herself.) With a universe's slowness, her life expands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiral Galaxy

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Arsenic, who offered encouragement whenever I said, "You know what your inbox needs? MORE NATASHA FEELS!"

In medical, they take Natasha's clothing. They need her shirt off to get at the ragged hole in her arm from Barton's arrow. They need her shoes off before they clean and swaddle her feet, cut through the soles from her run across the glass-studded rooftop. They need her pants off to clean the older wounds she had no time to keep from going putrid. They hand her a stack of folded replacements after that. Sweats and a t-shirt branded with their symbol across the chest. No shoes or socks to add to the clumsy bulk of bandages hobbling her feet. She wants her own things back, for all that they were rain- and blood-sodden and patched from too many months on the run.

Running stopped being an option when she let Barton corner her, it seems. They don't even allow her to walk to a holding cell, pressing her down into a wheelchair with just their looks. She's tired, and she hurts, but she could resist if she wanted to. If she cared enough. She had decided, even as she fled Barton, that she was done trying. She had expected death. Hoped.

A camera watches the hall outside her room, but she can't find one inside it. And it _is_ a room, not a cell. The medics let her in and leave. Neither Barton nor Fury, the only two names she knows, is waiting for her. Her bag is, though, at the foot of the bed. It takes her an hour of subtle exploration, and another of aggressive searching, to rule out cameras or bugs or traps. Nothing in the vents looks rigged up to gas her if she misbehaves. No suspiciously symmetrical holes in the walls or ceiling or minimal furniture hide equipment.

She drops to the floor, afraid even to touch the mattress, the one thing she has not been able to properly examine. Her injuries ache, the old ones worse than the new. Her breath flutters with the threat of tears on every exhale. She can't. She can't be sure yet. She can only remember crying deliberately three times in her life, when she had been absolutely certain she was alone. She isn't certain now.

Her bag has been searched. The knives, the spare gun and clips, even the aspirin bottle refilled with sedatives, all gone. The closest thing to a weapon left to her is the tiny pair of scissors in a hotel sewing kit. If they aren't tracking her with something in the room, they must be doing it with something on her. She hasn't lost consciousness, not even when they dosed her to flush and scrape clean the dead tissue on her thigh, so it won't be anything subdermal. The clothing, then.

She sits with her bare back to the wall and the t-shirt in her lap. The tips of her fingers barely fit in the grips of the scissors; taking out each hem and seam eats up the hours before dawn. She grows more frustrated with each failure. No trackers, no recording wires, no mysterious chips or filaments. By the time she pieces the shirt back together, making sure to insert the needle only in the existing holes as she sews, her hands shake and her eyes burn. She can't do the same with the sweats, out of time and energy both.

Barton came to heel for Fury, when moments before he had been warding off the other agents with bow drawn. Standing in the rain, surrounded by his own teammates, he had snarled, feral as she was, that he would shoot every last one of them if they touched her. Only for Fury had Barton dropped his defenses--of himself? Of her? Rain had streamed over his bald head, diverted around the patch over one eye. He hadn't blinked when Barton said, "I'm keeping her."

"SHIELD isn't in the habit of letting wounded assets stand out in the rain, Barton," Fury had said. He twirled a hand over his head. "Let's pack it up, people; you're not getting hazard pay for downpours." Barton had pulled her after Fury and into an unmarked van.

When the knock on her door proves to be that same man, she feels in herself the urge to fall in at his side. She hasn't taken orders willingly in years, but she wants him to make it simple for her. She wants to be told where to go, what to expect. She can't run, and she doesn't know how to stay, but she would if she was told to. Twelve hours in custody, eight on location, and she can feel them breaking her. With a room and a shirt and a dozen other unwelcome indulgences, they are breaking her.

***

Dr. Karga’s current joke about physics--the man’s fondness for geek jokes is only outdone by his willingness to spend three hours explaining the science that made them funny--breaks off with the boom of the right front tire blowing. Natasha tries to steady the wheel as it jerks in her hands. She hears the crack of Karga’s head hitting the window as they swerve. She shouts something--hold on, maybe, but she doesn’t remember. She accelerates, steadies, plans to ride through the blowout. She does everything right.

She sees the remnants of the tire carom off the guardrail. Not so much burst as bombed. It is the last thing she sees of the outside before they pitch right, hit the rail as well, and tumble over the edge into the ravine below.

They had been home free, as far as she was concerned, the job as good as over. They had made it out of Iran, across the sea, beyond immediate threats. They had new papers, picked up at the Seventh-Kilometer Market. (She had last seen it before the relocation, in the old walled maze of bruised ribs. She had been five years old, distributing poison darts under the cover of the market’s chaos.) They had a car, old and common, like any other on the M-16 that day. They should have been safe. She did everything right.

For a brief, weightless moment, the car goes silent around her. Then the front fender connects with the ground, and they go into an uneven roll. Heavy brush crunches and metal shrieks with the impacts of roof, trunk, passenger door, roof again. The seatbelt snaps Natasha’s collarbone on the first hit, a tiny, internal pop under everything else. Skull to window, neck whipped forward into nothing, and arm to steering wheel all follow. She can’t get herself oriented long enough to see Karga. The ground is all around her and nowhere.

They land slanted in a dry creek bed but miraculously upright. Natasha knows this because the blood from her head wound drips down her cheek, not up into her hair. Her right arm feels broken, but her left shoulder hurts more, so she uses the right to cut the seatbelt off. Turning her head to look at Karga makes her neck protest like cables winched too tight. He leans panting against the back seat, bloody-nosed and alive.

“It’s okay, Doc,” she says as she twists sideways to plant her foot on the crumpled door. “I’ll get us out of this. Just hang on.” A couple sharp kicks send it creaking open to hang off one hinge. Natasha breathes through the roll of nausea her shoulder inspires.

She can’t get the back door open from the outside with no strength in either arm. Karga shields his face while she uses the butt of her gun to bash out the window. With a hand on her right upper arm and her throbbing left shoulder, he hauls himself up out the window. “You’re hurt,” he says when she flinches, even as she helps him slither down to his hands and knees next to the car.

“I’ve had worse.” She crouches next to him while he paws at his bloody face. The giggles turn to snorts as the I’m-not-dead-yet euphoria kicks in. “Shut up, okay?” She needs to find cover, a route out of the ravine, and a plan for getting new transportation. She needs all those things before whoever took them out gets here to check the scene.

Karga swallows his laughter but clutches at his ribs like they hurt from more than that. Natasha shoves his hands aside to pull back his jacket. “A beautiful woman,” he starts to say, but he’s told this joke once before. She gets a wince when she presses, but not a scream, and there’s no blood seeping through. That’s good enough to be going on.

The car left a trail of flattened brush and dislodged rock on its trip down. Apart from that, Natasha can make out a few animal paths from bent branches and cleared ground. Karga got to his feet without trouble and her injuries won’t stop her from climbing. Her eyes go unfocused as she tries to track a clear route to the top of the ravine, where she can just see the twisted break in the guardrail. She blinks hard and knuckles at her eyes. Her injuries aren’t severe enough to make blood loss a problem, which means it’s probably a concussion. She opens her eyes and looks again.

He’s there. Standing on the edge of the road, he looks down as Natasha looks up. No warning, no approach, he’s just there. Natasha would think she had started to hallucinate, but she’s never been that lucky.

The top of his head and a few inches of forehead are the only things exposed. Only, no. The glint of metal on his left looks like his arm, not gear. He lifts the Barrett in his right, steadies it with that metal arm. Natasha’s hand on her own weapon stays down. Handgun versus rifle. She loses.

The moment seems to drag as they both realize the situation. Even so, there’s not enough time. She needs time. She wraps her arms around Karga and spins them together, putting her back to their attacker and Karga behind the shelter of her body. She needs to get on the other side of the car without exposing Karga to danger. She has a tiny window of opportunity here: get their attacker to come down the hillside after them, within range of her gun, but take him out before he can engage her in hand-to-hand when she’s injured. Clint would have been able to hand her this guy’s eye on an arrow, had he been with her. She feels very alone and entirely inadequate, but there’s a job to do.

“Behind the car,” she says as she turns away from Karga. “Stay down.” She fires once, knowing it’s nothing more than a distraction at this distance. She keeps herself in front of Karga as he scuttles toward the end of the car.

The shot comes as light, sound, pain in slow succession. Natasha fires back on instinct and resists the urge to put a hand to the place just above her pelvis where she can feel blood beginning to gush. That’s okay, she thinks, because that’s what she’s here for: to take the bullets long enough to get Karga to safety.

“Doc?” He hasn’t moved. She can feel it before he slumps sideways into the backs of her knees. “Doc?” She reaches back and feels his shaggy hair, the wet of blood, and dead weight. She fires one more wild shot before grabbing him and hauling him to cover. The strain on her arms punches out the last of her breath.

His weight drags her down across him to sprawl flat behind the car. The bullet, slowed on its trip through her, didn’t have enough force left to shatter Karga’s skull to pulp. It just left three tidy holes, into and out of her and into him. She stood guard over Karga, and their attacker still took him out with one perfect headshot. There’s nothing to put pressure on except her own wound. Karga’s sweet, laughing mouth has fallen into the slightly surprised blankness of death.

Eventually, Natasha will look over the top of the car and see the sniper with the metal arm has left as suddenly as he appeared. She will get herself up to the road, back to Odessa, and into the care of whatever SHIELD agents can get to her fastest. There’s no rush now, though. The job is over.

***

Barton skirts around where Hill has Palmer cornered for a lecture on acceptable mission expenses and the SHIELD policy on “throwing your gun away like a cowboy every time you run out of ammo.” Nick likes to see his agents back on the helicarrier himself, a questionable habit from the days when he had a little less on his plate, so he’s down there as well. Even so, he wouldn’t normally have a reason to still be here, holding up a wall.

Barton, fresh off another mission and on his way to forty-eight of well-deserved leave, stops at the door of the weapon cache. That damn bow is still in his hand, but the rest have been checked back in. “Sir.” He tilts his head in the direction of the doors. “Is this something that can be a walk and talk?” Nick’s used to the way Barton always _knows_. “There’s a bunk calling my name.”

Nick pushes away from the wall and lets Barton chart a course for his quarters. Before Nick can say anything, Barton asks, “How’s she holding up?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.” Barton’s pace is slower than usual; the man’s dead on his feet but sharp as ever. “An argument could be made for you being her new best friend.”

Barton scrubs at his face like maybe he can massage it into an actual expression. “Didn’t figure you for wild exaggerations, sir. I’ve tried conversation when we’ve been in the gym at the same time. Not making a lot of headway.”

“What about at the mess? She found a clique to sit with or is she still the unpopular new girl?” Nick wishes the comparison were less apt. Every time he sees her--less often than he should on his own carrier--she looks too young and too thin. If she owns anything worth going back for, she hasn’t asked or attempted. She lives in SHIELD-issue sweats and tees and even the smallest ones look too big on her. He’s recruited his share of questionable assets, but he’s never felt like he should be giving one warm milk and a bedtime story.

“If she’s eating there,” Barton says, then yawns and loses track of his sentence. “Uh. If she does, she’s raiding it during off hours. And I’m not sure about that, even.” Nick leaves Barton at his quarters. He gets a sleepy, smartass salute before Barton looks at the distance between the door and the bed like he might cry.

Romanov’s quarters aren’t far, just on the other side of the slightly tattered common room that hasn’t gotten hit by the wave of upgrades yet. When she opens the door to him, she holds the door wide. She expects him to come inside. Nick doesn’t want to examine the reasons for that as closely as he should. At any rate, he can see inside enough to spot the foil wrappers on the floor by the bed. She’s getting her four basic food groups: candy, chips, cookies, and jerky.

Romanov shifts her weight, never quite finishing the motion as she catches herself fidgeting. “Can I help you?” Her face, rigid, betrays nothing. It’s a tell all its own.

Sometimes, the best angle is straight ahead. “We send an escort team with our kitchen staff for supply runs. Make sure our food supplies aren’t compromised. That’ll be your first assignment. No objections to a literal milk run?”

The fixed neutral expression eases. It’s all tiny changes about the eyes, subtle enough to test even him. She shakes her head, but he’s already gotten his answer. “I’ll make arrangements, and your team leader will brief you further.” Straight ahead isn’t really Nick’s style, or hers.

***

Nick watches her enter the office in the reflection in the window. One strap of her dress has a tear where the mark got too impatient to take it off her gently. She tucked it back in place, but it sits wrong across her shoulder now. Hill already dropped off the flash drive Romanov came out with, and Natasha stares down at it when she reaches his desk. She stands at something approaching parade rest. When he turns around, she says, "I should debrief." Her voice comes just a touch too fast and high.

He can smell perfume and sweat on her. Her report probably hit his inbox before the jet landed; she only waits longer if she's flying with Barton and can copilot. Her eyes flick to the corners of the room, never quite looking directly at any of the security cameras. She should be back in her quarters, showering the mission from her skin, eating some of her stashed junk food to get the taste of champagne and men off her palate. But here she is.

He nods to the couch against the wall. She sits on the edge, hardly more relaxed than she had been standing. He spent the last forty-eight listening over comms as her dry banter withered into testiness and finally into single syllable reports and confirmations. The tendons in the top of her foot keep flexing under the straps of her heels. Staring straight ahead at nothing, she says, "Tanner has--"

Nick holds up a finger, and she bites off her words. He might regret this. Never be alone with a female subordinate. She came to him, though, instead of licking her wounds in private. "Secure office, full-dark protocol." The windows black out and multiple deadbolts secure the doors with a series of clicks. _Office secured. All recording and monitoring devices disabled._ It might not even work; Romanov never takes anyone's word for anything. Never mind being cornered in a locked room. "For our ears only." He doesn't specify what.

She nods sharply. "Tanner has a GPS lock on the files. They can only be accessed from inside his safe room." Nick makes a noise to show he is listening and continues rifling through the desk's bottom drawer. The chips he finds are old, but unopened, and he's only got that and those protein bars Lo's daughter had to sell for some club. Getting those past security and tox screens had been a pain, and the things weren't even good. "Someone will have to go in again if we need to alter the data a second time."

Natasha takes the bottle of room temperature water like she's never seen anything like it. Nick settles on the couch in a loose sprawl and waits. "His backers--" She trails off, turning the bottle in her hands. Up close, Nick sees thin lines scratched into her jaw, her neck, her hairline. One crescent of broken skin where a thumbnail dug in to press her mouth open. Her eyes drift over to the corner, the windows, the corner again, confirming.

With a sharp twist, she opens the bottle and takes a swig. "I said I could handle this mission." Her hand, when she presses the back of it to her lips, trembles. They've gotten to the point where Nick can trust her to perform flawlessly for any mission, no matter who he needs her to be. Getting her back and hitting the off switch on that other person, though, has come harder, slower.

"I know," Nick agrees. She bends forward to unbuckle the straps on her heels. When she sits up, she finally settles back from the edge of the couch. Her shoulders brush his arm where it stretches across the top of the couch. He doesn't dare move it and startle her away. With his teeth and his other hand, he peels down the wrapper of the god-awful protein bar. "You did handle it."

When she takes it, she sniffs it then bites off a chunk. She doesn't voice an objection to the substandard offering. She chews and swallows and bites off more with grim determination. A couple too-quick inhales interrupt her. "I handled it." The slow curling of her spine presses her into the bracket of his arm and side. She pulls her knees to her chest.

"But you can stop handling it now."

***

Natasha goes after the dummy body with rubber knife and fists and feet. The grip on the knife feels wrong, as does the weight, neither her preferred style. She wants something small, sharp, concealable. Not a damn meat cleaver. The dummy wobbles under a palm strike. It doesn’t matter. She practices for real in her quarters, keeping her strengths and weaknesses to herself. This is just for show.

For a bunch of spies and special operatives, SHIELD agents should learn a little subtlety. She feels eyes on her all the time now, and whispers chase her through the carrier’s halls. Natasha has been careful to cultivate her reputation, preserving the mystique of the Black Widow where it serves her, shedding pieces when they draw more suspicion than awe.

She pauses to grab up a towel and water bottle. She tips her head back to drink deep, using the moment to take stock of the room. Ward is on the treadmill in the corner, putting his back to the room in an overwrought display of confidence. A gaggle of junior agents, most of them older than Natasha, spar on the mats. That new assistant, who has been trying to keep up with Hill’s brutal hours, runs through yoga poses with joyless efficiency.

Natasha catches at least five people checking her out. Barton comes closest to being an ally, and that's as far as her connections go here. Every eye on her belongs to someone who fears her, or admires her, or underestimates her. Make that six people--Natasha's eyes jump to the entrance and the aviator shades tracking her. Agent May takes them off and hooks them into the zip of her field suit. Seven sets of eyes on Natasha. Ten. The room.

The rumors and jokes started shortly before Fury sent her out on her first proper mission. By the time she got back, the only member of the team too stone-faced to show a flush of pride at their success, the rumors had taken root. May vs. Widow: place your bets.

She listens, of course. She tracks the odds given, but more so, the reasons. May lacks Widow's ruthlessness. Widow lacks May's experience. Differences in height and weight, preferred weapons, known skill sets. Listening to those reasons, the voices that think it through a little, doesn't hurt as much as some of the others. She expects the jabs about her background, her age, her methods. More disturbing are the ones that turn on May, one of their own, with attacks on her sense of humor, her friendship with Coulson, her family connections. Finally, there are the ones who just want to see Natasha and May make each other bleed, because they are both women and that is somehow always all they are good for.

Natasha hasn’t let herself be caught watching May from across the mess hall. She pays her no more mind than any other agent when passing in the corridors. Still, Natasha cannot help running her own numbers. Even if May does not want to challenge Natasha, someone will goad her into it. Natasha knows rumors, and this one has teeth.

When May starts down the stairs into the training area, Natasha knows the moment has come. The murmur in the room picks up, bolder than a spotlight, as agents raise their heads, turn, pause mid-sentence. No one even pretends at subtlety any longer. May strides across the mats; Natasha sets down the towel in her hands. Amid the chatter, Natasha’s mind goes quiet. She decided a week ago, she will lose. May outranks her and has enough pull to make Natasha’s life difficult if offended. The only question remaining is how quickly Natasha will yield, how much of a show she will put on and for whom.

Over May's shoulder, Natasha watches agents hastily passing money back and forth for one last bet. Without turning her head, May raises an eyebrow at the antics. "We're not going to give them the satisfaction, are we?"

It's said as a foregone conclusion, but not the one Natasha expected. The silence in her mind evaporates in a flurry of calculations and strategies, invented and abandoned and reconstructed. When Natasha shakes her head, it does not feel like backing down, like a forfeit. When May follows that up with an invitation to join her in the mess, it feels like winning something.

***

Melinda, gun in hand, opens the safe house door for what turns out to be a soaking wet assassin. Romanov’s lips match the blue of her largely ruined gown. Mud splashes weigh down the hem; scratches stand out red on the pale skin of her bare arms. Gusts of wind spray the rain in at Melinda. Romanov stands buffeted by it until Melinda hauls her inside by the arm.

“What are you doing here?” Melinda asks while pulling squelching shoes from Romanov’s feet. Romanov _should_ be locked in a mansion with a hundred other guests of Van Pelt’s apocalypse-themed storm party. Very Masque of the Red Death, very exclusive, and very useful cover for Romanov’s mission. The storm itself has proven less fierce than predicted, making Melinda’s stay in the safe house tolerable. It is by no means tolerable outside, however.

“I got made.” Her teeth chatter. Stumbling into the bathroom seems to take the last of her energy. The reserves of professionalism and survival instinct that kept her going have run out. She collapses onto the edge of the tub with exhausted finality.

Melinda runs the bath water lukewarm. Even so, Natasha flinches when her feet touch it. They turn pink again as Melinda washes away the mud and lingering cold. With cooperation, they get the soaked clothing off Natasha, and she eases herself down into the tub.

Eyes closed, she says, “One of the security guys is a merc. That's the second time I've gotten to what he was guarding, but he recognized me.” She sounds as close to embarrassed as Melinda has ever heard her.

“Why the hell didn't that come up in mission planning?” Melinda gathers the coarse towels the house stocks. She pulls out the first comfortable clothes she finds in Natasha's bag without rifling and adds them to the pile. She thought they had a good handle on the old contacts and enemies that might interfere with missions involving Romanov.

“Van Pelt added more security. I don't know if someone tipped him off or--” She ducks under the water to wet down her hair. Melinda watches as she does something while under that allows her to come back up with a handful of bobby pins and her hair loose again. “He didn't know it was me, though. Just this one merc.” Her eyes close as she's speaking.

“I'll radio HQ, let them know the op is blown.”

Natasha startles and jerks upright in the tub with a slosh. “No, I got it. Sorry.” She roots around in the pile of clothing on the floor and pulls out a memory card. She tosses it up into the counter then drapes herself over the edge of the tub.

She takes the towels and clothing from Melinda in turn until she is left in dry clothes with a towel around her hair. If Melinda can just get some food into her before she falls asleep, Melinda will feel like she's redeemed herself for the sin of allowing Natasha to make that escape alone.

Moving on autopilot, Natasha sinks onto the bed. The towel tumbles away from her hair as her head lolls. “I dumped the merc’s body out a window,” she mutters down at her lap. “They might not find him until after the party, at least. That'll give us the time we need to use the intel before he knows it's been taken. I needed to get out though.”

“Of course you did, but that's why I--”

“No.” She gives her head a shake. Her ragged curls leave damp patches on her shirt. “An extraction would have tipped him off. This was fine.”

Melinda bites back any more argument. The last thing Natasha needs right now is to be told that taking out a threat, completing the mission, and walking through a storm to avoid detection somehow wasn't _good enough_. “You're right. You did well.” The way one last muscle seems to unknot, allowing Natasha to fully relax, cements Melinda’s assessment.

She keeps an eye on Natasha while she gets leftover takeout heating in the microwave. Natasha bolts the resulting plate of food down, not even pausing to taste it first, like she really is racing against the need to sleep. When she scoots back on the bed, though, she sits pawing at her hair while Melinda dumps the plate in the sink. She combs fingers through her hair, but the combination of wind-tangled curls and fatigued hands leaves the snarls even worse. The dip in the bath got them wet but did nothing to smooth them out.

“Let me,” Melinda says. She settles on the bed at Natasha's shoulder, still in her line of sight, with a comb from her bag. Natasha's hum of agreement sounds almost like a purr. Melinda gathers a section and begins to comb out the ends with steady strokes. “Your specialty is becoming rich weirdos.”

“Maybe next time, the rich weirdo could be less evil.” Melinda laughs at the plaintive note in Natasha’s voice. Come morning, Natasha will have the energy to offer her more witty commentary on whatever she observed of the mark during her truncated stay with him. For now, she worms her toes under the rumpled blankets and lets Melinda work.

“You going to start recruiting the sort of recluses Sci-Ops loves so much?” Natasha wrinkles her nose. Now and then, enough water accumulates in her hair to drip down Melinda’s fingers and the comb. She didn't realize how long Natasha's hair was due to the curls, but it stretches long and slick and dark between Melinda’s fingers.

By the time she finishes, she's pretty sure Natasha has actually fallen asleep, slumped but still mostly upright. She snorts awake when Melinda starts shifting her down and under the blankets, but settles quickly enough, she may not remember any part of the process by morning.

***

Phil Coulson is not a fool. He sticks with what works. He pushes hard to keep good teams together, whether they stay with him or not. He collects working spy memorabilia, and the R&D department accepts his occasional requests for remakes with good grace. He orders from the same Italian place two blocks out from the Triskelion whenever he’s in town, because their food is delicious garbage. When his team is especially good, or especially battered, he orders enough for them all and brings it to a free meeting room.

He’s got a double order of everything when he walks in. They successfully rescued the Nigerian cultural attaché and the undercover agent assigned to her; that’s the first order. Perez successfully made it through surgery for multiple GSWs an hour ago; that’s the second one. Nakashima stayed down in medical with Perez, but when Phil arrives, the rest of the team looks up with a weary kind of contentment.

“Good work today,” he tells the room at large. Setting the food on the conference table attracts a swarm of hungry agents.

“Time to let cholesterol finish what the other side didn’t, huh?” The pro forma objection doesn’t stop Al Massri from attacking a vat of lasagna with a wholly inadequate plastic knife and fork.

“Maybe keep May from hogging all the garlic bread this time, boss,” Clint says, hovering in position to grab up food next.

An arm appears over his shoulder, the side he’s not watching, and liberates one of three loaves. “Coulson knows better than to try,” Melinda informs Clint, already retreating with her prize. Clint gives her a sad whine, as though he’s not going to follow right after her and get handouts anyway.

What he’s not expecting is who Melinda joins before Clint can get there. Normally, Melinda’s all for sitting in the middle of things, ready to trade jokes and stories with whoever she’s had to pick up that mission. Everyone knows Melinda; eventually everyone needs a ride home. Melinda has hauled a chair off to the side, though, to join the one already there.

Romanov doesn’t go sit in the corner, because people would notice that sort of behavior. She just establishes three feet of extra space between her and everyone else. It’s always enough to make attention slip away from her. Melinda makes straight for her though. As Phil dishes out food to his team without looking, he watches Romanov scoot her chair to the side, making room for Melinda. When Melinda peels back the foil on the garlic bread, Romanov breaks off a hunk. She sniffs the bread and takes a small, testing bite, but Phil has seen her do that to all her food. What's happening now is impressive enough.

Nick tasked Phil with finding a place for Romanov. Normally, new recruits get placed based on skills available, with adjustments made for personality clashes as needed. In time, teams solidify naturally. Romanov should be easy, then: her skill set has both the breadth and depth to make her valuable on any op; she works with even openly hostile agents with the kind of obliviousness born out of calculated manipulation.

Phil has placed her with seven teams in four months. He’s still not satisfied. The adaptability and unshakable neutrality that should be assets let her slip into any team...and just as quickly slip away. She doesn’t make connections. She doesn’t work with her teams, so much as operate with an awareness that there are a lot of sometimes useful objects around her.

Clint brings over his own chair to perch on and two plates of pasta. He carries on shouting to the rest of the team from there, but he’s put himself between them and the pair of women. Romanov takes food from him as well. Perhaps more surprisingly, she tears off some of her own bread and hands it to him when he starts whining at Melinda. Phil doesn’t miss that it’s a piece Romanov has already inspected with a sniff and bite and deemed safe to eat.

Phil had been planning to reassign Romanov again. Her failure to react normally to Perez’s injury had obviously offended Perez’s usual teammates. He hasn’t seen anything to recommend that she stay. Even Clint, a floater agent as long as he’s been there, manages to make a few friends wherever he goes. If Phil has one floater agent, though, perhaps he could have two. A pair. Small, effective, unusually adaptable. Add in someone to get them there and back, and he’d have a surgical strike team better than anything else SHIELD could offer.

Phil could call the three of them over to the rest of the group before he sits down to eat as well. He could push and pull until something gave. SHIELD might see the value in lone wolf types, but Phil will always prefer the stability of a team, even a small one.

It seems Romanov isn’t as alone has he had thought, though. Phil leaves the three to their dinner. He’s not a fool.

***

The arrow hits the target before Clint even feels the rasp of the string across his unguarded fingers. The op had him waiting in position for a few hours before he took the shot and a couple more before he could evac. It’s the sort that leaves his body a little stiff from holding still, but the rest of the exhaustion is all in his mind. That leaves nothing to stop him from firing arrows on the base range until his shoulders give out and his fingers bleed and his mind shuts up already.

Nothing, except maybe the tiny redhead slipping in behind him.

Clint fires again. His eyes are barely focused, the wide-open stare that lets him see the whole range at once. He could hit the stationary targets with his eyes closed, but that’s not the point. The point is to go back to the quiet place where nothing exists but the bow in his hands and the line drawn between him and the target. Clint thinks maybe he’s spending too much time in that place, if today is where it’s taking him.

When he feels Natasha at his side, he says, “Fury send you?”

She settles into the next spot on the range, sitting on the narrow counter. The divider between them blocks everything but her slowly swinging feet. “Did he need to?”

Clint lets his eyes close. “Not today, okay? I can’t do the whole answer with a question thing right now.” He can feel blood on his fingers. He thinks, suddenly, of learning to play the guitar during quiet nights at the circus. The steel strings had bit into even his tough fingers. He hasn’t played in years.

“You’re punishing yourself,” Natasha says, because if she’s not allowed to ask questions, she defaults to stark statements. It takes another moment for her to say, less decisively, “I don’t understand.”

“The assassin they sent.”

“DOA,” she reports, neutral as an autopsy.

“I know, I already--” Coulson hadn’t wanted to tell Clint yet, but Hill had done it for him. Clint had hoped--well. Just because he didn’t miss didn’t mean he always killed what he shot. “Thirteen. They think, anyway. Not like her handlers kept track of birthdays.”

“This upsets you.”

“Not you, though?” Clint fires as he says it. He’s running low on arrows. He’s not ready to quit yet, but if he gets a reload, he’ll run through it. That might be too much to fire after an op, which means it might actually be enough.

“Should it?”

“She shouldn’t have been there!” Clint doesn’t know how he started shouting, when he dropped the bow, why he’s standing in front of where Natasha sits and yelling like she kicked his dog. “She was just a kid, and I took her out, and it could have been you down there.”

It could have been Natasha with an arrow in something more vital than the arm.

Clint’s knees decide they’ve had just about enough of all this. Clint sits down on the dusty range floor, eye level with Natasha’s shins. He sits down very suddenly, and it kind of hurts, but in an annoying, adding salt to the sea kind of way. His head feels like a tire with a slow leak, just going flatter and flatter the more it tries to roll along. He might be freaking out.

He stares forward at Natasha’s swinging legs, one two, one two. He realizes she’s matching them to his breathing only after she’s started to wind the rhythm down for him. She’s wearing the cute pink sneakers with her SHIELD sweats. Clint has to scrub his hands over his face before he starts crying about pink shoes and really embarrasses himself in front of her.

“Yes,” Natasha says, like there wasn’t a tiny little breakdown to interrupt the conversation. “In ‘91, it was. Very like this op, anyway. She was much older than I was then.” He gives her a look that says thirteen will never be “much older” than anything. She has the hood up on her sweatshirt, cupping shadows around her face as he stares up at her. “Yes, it could have been me. That’s why I’m not upset. I know how little being thirteen means to someone like that.”

“Why did I bring you in? Why didn’t I kill you? What made you different?”

“What makes you think I know the answer to that?”

“You’ve always been smarter than me.” Clint suspects Natasha knows the answer to everything. She knows all the secrets, anyway. She touches the toe of one foot to his shoulder. It’s a weird substitute for a hug, but that’s Natasha for you. Clint leans the side of his head against her calf. “Why’d I have to kill her, Nat?”

“Because someone higher on the list made the easy choice. They made someone else do their dirty work for them.” He doesn’t know if she means the assassin or Clint himself. Maybe that’s part of the problem he’s having. “Someone made a call and paid a fee. Someone found a child, trained her up, sent her out. Because they didn’t want to do the hard parts themselves.”

She rocks her foot against his shoulder, making him sway. The pressure feels pretty good, now that he thinks about it, right where the top line of his shoulder has started to tie up.

“That’s it?” He doesn’t know why he feels the need to goad her, especially when she could probably kick and break his neck right now. “Bad people made it happen, deal with it? Can’t you do better than that? Give me the answer that makes it easy to show up for work tomorrow? Aren’t you going to tell me why it was all okay?”

“No. It wasn’t okay. It was necessary. They’re not the same thing.”

Now that he has stopped moving, Clint can feel every ache and sting at once. He seriously considers the option of going to sleep on the range floor. The bow case works as a pillow if you just don’t care anymore. Natasha stops rocking him, though, and hops down to haul him to his feet. She doesn’t even mind the bloody fingerprints he leaves. She’s good like that.

“You don’t get to have easy,” she says as she drags him through the motions of packing away the bow and clocking out of the range. “We’re there to do what other people won’t. The hard and ugly things. That’s what we’re good for.”

***

At the knock on the door, Natasha unfolds herself from a deep stretch. She still likes to keep some of her practice time private, beyond the prying eyes of agents who haven't learned better yet. Slinging a towel around her neck, she opens the door for Nick. She hasn't seen him in about a week, between a couple light recon missions against minor armies and his work. "What brings you down from the panopticon?" Clint still doesn't like the helicarrier's bridge--"I want to see with my own eyes, not a bunch of cameras from forty thousand feet."--but Natasha sees why it appeals to Nick. The ultimate high ground.

"Hill kicked me out so she can terrorize the analysts in peace. They keep forgetting that she can see everything they do down in the computer pit."

Natasha bounces onto her bed so Nick can take the sole chair. She takes enough long assignments, it hardly seemed worth it to requisition more for her quarters. "I don't see why she has to say anything to them." She towels sweat from her face, then says, "She'll catch them at more stuff if they don't remember she can see their screens."

"I think the goal is to have them working, not just find excuses to throw them off the flight deck." He doesn't smile, but she doesn't need him too. She doesn't imagine she knows all his secrets, but she understands him now.

"Oh, well, if _those_ are her priorities." She leans forward, elbows braced to folded knees. "But this isn't a social call."

He tosses a thick dossier to her. “I have a job for you out in California. You like the beach?”

“No. I burn," she answers absently, unwinding the string holding the file shut. "What’s the job?”

A glossy photo greets her. Pretentious facial hair, excellent suit, a spray of pinprick welding burns across the back of the hand. She flips through the pages: personal history, known associates, SI financial data, recorded inventions, psych profiles from half a dozen analysts in and out of SHIELD, medical charts. Anthony Stark loves shiny things, doing the impossible, and taunting the press and the senate equally. Rich weirdos again. Natasha looks up.

“Need you to go make a new friend.” Nick does smile then, which tells her even more.

“I don’t have friends,” she answers on reflex.

"Uh-huh. You want me to send wardrobe in?"

"No, I'll handle it." The pieces of a new cover start to click together in her head, running in isolation until she's sure she's ready to inhabit someone new. "What's my budget?"

"Stark doesn't deserve you, but Potts has good taste--she'll notice. Let's call it a three designer job, mid tier only, keep it appropriate for your career. Have the jet back by ten."

She sighs, pulling a damp curl away from her face and considering the merits of dyes and straighteners. "I'm not going to have any fun on this one, am I?"

"I don't know about that." Nick levers himself out of the chair with an old man groan, something he'll only indulge in with her. "Poking Stark with a stick has its amusing moments. Make your own fun."

He leaves her with the file. Running in tandem with her new persona is her reading of Stark. Truths shuffle along with pages. The persona adjusts to create someone ideally suited to catch the attention of a rich, impulsive, possibly terminal genius who plays at being a superhero in his spare time. Meanwhile, Natasha takes a shower and eats lunch in the mess hall. She calls Melinda at her new desk job and texts Clint to find out what he wants from the planet's surface while she's down there. She exists just as herself. Nick gave her two week's notice, so she has plenty of time before she has to become--Natalie, she decides, because it's been a while since she had an American name. Two weeks before Natasha gets wrapped up safe and tucked away for however long the op takes, waiting to come to life again when it finishes.

Her heart moves with a universe’s slowness, unnoticed by those in the midst of it, unnoticed even by Natasha. She came to them with nothing, a solitary point, waiting to be broken even smaller. Year by year, she winds larger instead. Yet the center stays the same, and the earliest curves of her spiral get held closest.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://joycesully.tumblr.com/), crying about badass ladies being friends.


End file.
